A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis

The notion that psychoanalysis is somehow a ""Jewish science'' has brought together strange bedfellows: gentiles eager to disparage Sigmund Freud, Jews eager to claim him and his daughter, Anna Freud. Gay (The Bourgeois Experience) reviews the various claims for the Jewishness of psychoanalysis and finds them to be wholly without merit. Paradoxically, he argues that Freud's position as an outsideran atheist and Jewenabled him to pierce the taboo topics of sexuality and the unconscious which led to his momentous discoveries. In this valuable essay, Gay, a professor of history at Yale, brings great sensitivity and insight to a debate that still persists in some quarters. He disputes the idea that psychoanalysis is a form of religion, tracing Freud's roots back to Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Newton. (October)